The present invention relates to a robot apparatus which is suitable for application to, for example, an entertainment robot for family use.
In recent years, entertainment robots have been developed for use as hobby or entertainment at home. Entertainment robots of this kind have shapes, for example, well resembling to quadruped animals such as a dog, a cat or the like which are raised at home, and are equipped with a visual sensor, a tentacle sensor and so on in addition to a microprocessor and a signal processing circuit such that they autonomously act based on a predetermined control program.
An entertainment robot configured as mentioned above stores basic operation programs out of control programs and data such as emotion models and so on in an internal memory disposed within a body to act based on these operation programs and emotion models. With this configuration, if the user wants the entertainment robot to perform an action desired by the user, the user cannot but disassemble the entertainment robot to exchange the internal memory or rewrite data in the internal memory, which however is difficult for ordinary users.
The present invention has been made in view of the foregoing problem, and is intended to propose a robot apparatus which can remarkably improve the usability.
To solve the problems, in the present invention, a robot apparatus which actuates a movable portion based on a predetermined control program to autonomously perform actions, comprises fixed storage means fixed at a predetermined position in the robot apparatus, removable storage means removably disposed at a predetermined position of the robot, and control means for storing control data used to operate the control program in the fixed storage means or in the removable storage means in accordance with the type of the control data or for reading control data from the fixed storage means or from the removable storage means in accordance with the type of the control data.
Thus, when the control data used to operate a control program is stored in the fixed storage means or the removable storage means, or when control data is read from the fixed storage means or the removable storage means, the robot apparatus can appropriately use the fixed storage means or the removable storage means in accordance with the type of the control data, and can remove the removable storage means to readily add, delete and rewrite data contents, thereby making it possible to remarkably improve the usability.
Further, in the present invention, a robot apparatus which actuates a movable portion based on a predetermined control program to autonomously perform actions, comprises storage means disposed at a predetermined position of the robot apparatus, and control means for storing control data used to execute the control program in the storage means in accordance with the type of the control data, and for reading the control data from the storage means in accordance with the type of the control data, wherein the storage means stores a change in internal states caused by the control means when the movable portion is actuated.
Thus, since the robot apparatus stores in the storage means changes in internal states caused by control means when a movable portion is actuated , such changes in internal states can be subsequently retrieved for confirmation, thereby making it possible to remarkably improve the usability.